Stefano Mazzotta, 1980.

​

Photography and other stories.
 
 

After training at the theater school of Cantieri Teatrali Koreja in Puglia, in 2000 I graduated as a dancer and choreographer at the Civica Scuola d'Arte Drammatica Paolo Grassi, thus building my artistic vision in the sign of contamination between genres and languages.

 

I studied theater and dance, among others, with Jan Cebron, Beatrice Libonati, Bruce Michelson, Marco Baliani, Raffaella Giordano, Michele Abbondanza, Maria Consagra. 

I worked as an interpreter for Ismael Ivo, Hervè Koubi, Luca Veggetti, Avi Kaiser, Monica Casadei, Roberto Zibetti, Pier Luigi Pizzi, Susanna Beltrami, moving between Italy, France, Germany and Brazil.

​

In 2005 Zerogrammi was born, a dance company of which I am the founder and artistic director, with which I have produced numerous creations in collaboration with international theaters and festivals in Italy, Portugal, France, Russia, Singapore, Holland, Germany, Spain, Taiwan, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, obtaining prizes and recognitions including the Golden Mask from the Bolshoi Theater in 2012, the Hystrio Prize in 2013 and the Danza&Danza Prize in 2021.
 

Over the years I have conceived and directed projects that have been able to use the languages of the scene at the service of educational, social and community contexts, in collaboration with organizations and institutions operating in fields transversal to the artistic one and at the same time carrying out an intense activity as a trainer and tutor in dance and choreography.

 

Since 2012 I have been directing CASA LUFT, headquarters of Zerogrammi and choreographic production house in Piedmont, where I coordinate a complex project that unfolds between production, artistic residency and professional training (over 100 projects and authors supported and produced since 2012).
 

My artistic path, enriched by the experience of different languages and contexts, becomes the driving force of different and parallel outputs: over time, around the definition of choreographic creations I have signed editorial products, photographic catalogs and cinematographic projects including the most recent Elegy of lost things, awarded in 2022 as Best Film at international festivals including Riff (Norway), PDFF (USA), Experimental dance festival (Canada), International meeting on video dance (Spain).

 

The language of dance dialogues and is contaminated with literature, photography, video and the plastic arts, defining the stages of a travel and research diary. The creative process becomes a dialectical relationship between different languages, cultures and experiences.

​

In this journey, photography is the language I return to most frequently in search of a synthesis of my creative wanderings. It is the tool with which I can most easily focus on the relationship between my own body and the body of the world, between space and time in a game that loves to shuffle the cards, overturning the perception of body and landscape, of past and future.